The Adoration of the Magi

The Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto commissioned the altarpiece in March 1481 on unusual terms: Leonardo was to finish it within thirty months. He left Florence for Milan the following year with the panel still in its underpainting of brown and ochre.

What he left is a crowd of more than sixty figures pressing toward the Virgin, faces stretched by awe, hands raised, an old man shading his eyes. Behind them a ruined building with broken stairs and rearing horses suggests the old pagan world giving way.

His preparatory perspective study, now in the Uffizi, shows him building the ruined architecture on a careful grid and then filling it with movement. Infrared images of the panel reveal how much he changed as he went.